Ballad Form and Catholic Chastity in Elizabeth Madox Roberts' Black Is My Truelove's Hair

SCHOLARSHIP Ballad Form and Catholic Chastity in Elizabeth Madox Roberts' Black Is My Truelove's Hair John P. Langan In 1938, Elizabeth Madox Roberts published Black Is My Truelove's Hair, the novel that was to be her last. Its roots lay in a sketch Roberts had written in 1933 called "Tamed Honey" which, she told a friend, "had been suggested by John Jacob Niles' singing of an old ballad, 'Black Is My Truelove's Hair'" (sic; Campbell & Foster 71). As William Slavick has told us, the book proper "apparently began as a sketch, "The Captive,'" which subsequently became "The Screaming Gander," which in turn became Black Is My Truelove's Hair (Slavick 760). Roberts described her "intention" in the novel "to penetrate an event in all its implications, deeply and more deeply, until it yielded its entire meaning in Time" (Rovitt 116). The book met with critical success, and has in general maintained that early esteem. Campbell and Forster, for example, judge it "a memorable novel" whose "symbolism compels two or three readings to catch its full savor" (Campbell & Foster 181). Earl Rovitt describes the book's method as "intensive and dramatic" and argues that in the novel "Miss Roberts finds in the processes of normal sexuality an affirmation of the development of the healthy spirit, and a stimulation toward harmonious expansion" (Rovitt 117). Rovitt also reads the novel "as a symbolic examination into the same area of death and rebirth which we found in My Heart and My Flesh" (127). Frederick McDowell groups the book with A Buried Treasure as having "less breadth and depth than (Roberts's) other novels," though "within their limits they are often evocative and fresh" (McDowell 63). For his part, Lewis Simpson judges the novel "more complex" than A Buried Treasure and asserts that it "poses the nostalgic possibility of recovering the balladic world" (Simpson 802). Discussion of the novel has tended to ignore its title in all but the most cursory of ways: namely, that the two love interests of the protagonist, Dena Janes, both have black hair. Instead, critics have tuned their gaze elsewhere to uncover the book's meaning. Pearl 43 Anderson Sherry finds the book "explicit within its framework," which she identifies as the Greek myth of Persephone (Sherry 825-826). Similarly, Rovitt sees the novel as Roberts's return to "the formula of death and rebirth as defined by an unsuccessful, and then a successful, love relationship," a formula he also finds in The Time ofMan and My Heart and My Flesh (Rovitt 117). Campbell and Foster, too, recognize "the archetypal pattern of death and rebirth" in the story of Dena Janes, but they go on to say that that archetypal plot is realized through a structure that shares much with drama and with music, specifically, the pastorale (Campbell and Foster 181-182). While Campbell and Foster never develop their structural observations as fully as they might, and while I believe they are mistaken in their identification of the pastorale as the musical model for Black Is My Truelove's Hair, nonetheless, they deserve credit for recognizing the role that musical structures play in Roberts's work. McDowell in large part agrees with Campbell and Foster and Rovitt, though he is more precise in his language: for him, the novel is "chiefly concerned with Dena Janes's psychic restoration" (McDowell 80). Simpson's observation concerning the "balladic world" of the novel is potentially the most accurate of the comments on it, but he fails to elaborate his remark. It will be my purpose here to reflect on the ways in which Black Is My Truelove's Hair employs strategies culled from the ballad form in order to tell its story. I will argue that its narrative arrangement has been inadequately appreciated, and that what most commentators have understood to be the novel's principle story, Dena Janes's disastrous relationship with Bill Langtry, is in fact not the key to understanding its chief concerns; rather, I will contend that we need to turn to one of its subplots, Dena's loss and recovery of her older sister's gold thimble, to appreciate its themes. This will lead me...